What Next-Gen Tech, Gadgets Are You Most Looking Forward To?

CES 2011 wrapped up about a week past, and from the the look of things, there is some pretty sweet new tech on the horizon. There are tablets, smartphone/laptop combos, tablet/netbook combos, concept cars/bikes, connected TVs, WiFi-connected refrigerators, unifying cloud storage services, and much much more.

After the jump, I’ve listed three of the things I’m most looking forward to, as well as links to a few articles from folks who were at the event. Have a read, be tantalized and amazed — and let us know what you are most excited about in the world of tech and gadgets this year!

Motorola Xoom

There’s a reason this year is being heralded as the year of the tablet — and there’s a reason that this tablet stole the entire show. Motorola’s Xoom tablet was the only one at the show using the new, optimized-for-tablets Android Honeycomb. It’s packing a 10.1 inch display, 1280×800 resolution, 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor, and front and rear cameras. It’s ridiculously fast, can take 720p video, and will have 4G capability in the second quarter of the year.

There’s no word on the price of this beauty, but it ought to give the iPad — possibly even the iPad 2 — a serious run for its money. Just the fact that it has all that power, supports Flash, and is on a network other than AT&T (Verizon) might be enough to sway some users. It is unknown whether there will be a WiFi-only version or not, or if anyone outside of Verizon will get a hold of it — but I hope that Motorola would be smart enough not to limit themselves.

Motorola Atrix 4G

Motorola came to win at CES this year, and their smartphone offering is, in a word, awesome! I own an iPhone and an iPad, and I thoroughly enjoy them both, but the geek in me is loving what companies like this are doing with Android. The phone itself is beefy (the dual-core Tegra 2 chip and 1GB of ram make playing 1080p video and Flash a breeze), but the coolest thing about it is the dock — which turns it into a laptop.

Seriously.

The phone just plugs into the back of the 2.4 pound laptop dock, and voila! You get an 11.6 inch screen with a compressed keyboard, a trackpad, and webtop software that lets you surf the full-sized web, even picking up where you left off on the phone. You can also access the phone’s interface, and run its apps in full screen. According to LaptopMag, you can even run Citrix Receiver, which allows you to basically run full Windows right there on the machine.

Very cool!

Real Networks Unifi: One Cloud Service to Rule Them All

Real Networks is coming out with a cloud service to combine all cloud services. Unifi will allow you to aggregate your multimedia files — or whatever files — that are on multiple devices and online services. This would allow you to keep just one central online media and file library to organize, manage, and access all of your stuff. Its incredibly convenient, especially as we are moving more and more to the cloud. The interface looks pretty good, too.

Apparently, Unifi will be open for public beta in a couple of months, and Real Networks plans to offer the standard freemium model: 2GB of storage for free, with paid plans that climb up to 100GB. iOS and Android apps should be available around the same time as the beta lanch, with Windows Mobile 7 and Blackberry apps to follow. It ought to be useful for Google Chrome OS when it finally goes live, as well.

So those are the things that really stood out to me in CES 2011, but there were many, many more — good, bad, and weird. Here are a few links:

Bobby isn't 40-something, but is a strong supporter of the Grown-up Geek kind. He's a loving husband and father first, but is also a freelance writer, productivity nut, operatically trained singer, and (not-so) closet geek.
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7 Comments

jon says:

I have been waiting since the iPad was released for a good Android Tablet, looks like Honeycomb is going to provide hardware makers that. I will be jumping on a Xoom most likely – the only reason that I would not is if ASUS can get their act together and release concrete details and release date for the Transformer.

The Atrix looks awesome – it is to bad though that Chrome OS is not ready for release yet because that would be slick to dock a Android phone to a Chrome OS notebook and have the two OS’s interact together to provide a seamless user experience.

I agree, Jon. The Atrix combined with a ChromeOS laptop would be very cool! I wonder why Google didn’t think of it…

I was actually very surprised by the lack of ChromeOS hardware at CES. Come to think of it, weren’t there supposed to be a few units released late last year or something?

The Xoom looks to be the first real competitor to the iPad. Unless the iPad 2 is unspeakably awesome, Android tablets may wipe the floor with it. People like user experience, but tend to frown when its at the expense of choice. Android definitely offers choice.

jon says:

I was not surprised to see no ChromeOS this year at CES. Look at all the Android there was – I am sure that Google did not want to take away from their hot OS last week.

Spent some time looking this morning at the Notion Ink Adam. The display that uses looks just about perfect with different options depending on what you are actually doing. Looks like it would be the best option if looking to use a tablet as a eReader as well. That brings into play 3 tablets to choose from now. Decisions, decisions….

The Notion Ink looks really interesting, I agree. Brave of them to walk away from the sure thing by creating their own unique UI. The Blackberry tablet looks pretty sweet too — but I really haven’t liked Blackberry hardware in the past…